Barely 24 hours after the murder of a female undergraduate in Ise Ekiti by gunmen, another male resident has been hacked to death in Orin Ekiti by gunmen.
The public relations officer of the Ekiti State Police Command, Caleb Ikechukwu, who confirmed the development, told journalists in Ado Ekiti on Saturday that everything was being done by the command to apprehend the killers.
The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) reports that the latest victim was identified as Emmanuel Ilori, a hunter and rice farmer at Orin Ekiti in the Ido-Osi Local Government Area of the state.
Residents said that Mr Ilori was killed late on Friday by gunmen described as herdsmen while Ilori and his colleagues were hunting.
One of the hunters, Adeniyi Ajayi, said that Mr Ilori’s killers were Fulani herdsmen and that they were more than 20 in number.
He said that the killers opened fire when the hunters queried them on their mission in the farming Ekiti community.
Mr Ajayi said that the herdsmen had been hibernating in forests in the community for long, terrorizing farmers and other people in the community.
NAN learnt that Ilori’s body had been taken away by security agents after the incident was reported to them.
Meanwhile, the latest killing has sparked protests among residents of Orin Ekiti with pleas for the government to end the incessant killings.
The protesters made bonfires and rained curses on Ilori’s killers, amid lamentations on the persistent killing of farmers by herdsmen nationwide.
The chairman of Rice Farmers in Ekiti State, kolawole Rotimi, told NAN that a pregnant woman was similarly, killed by herdsmen in Orin Ekiti last year.
(NAN)